Sitting down at her computer, Carla felt awkward—her center of gravity had relocated to her belly and her body, swollen by water weight, seemed to have been taken over by some alien force. But that force was her son, and this morning she had felt him stir inside her. Once her profession had made her near obsessive in her pursuit of fitness and litheness of movement. Now she could smile at herself, this awkward creature, happy at any sign of her baby’s health. To become a mother was by far the most important supporting role of her all too self-focused life.
But it was that life about which Adam Blaine was curious. “I know you were drawn to acting,” he had written. “In some ways, all of us are actors. To my detriment, I’ve spent the last decade playing different parts, often within minutes of each other. But few of us become famous for it.”
So he was willing to acknowledge this, Carla thought—at least in a letter. To the extent she could trust herself, every instinct she possessed told her that at heart Adam was a good and compassionate man. But she wondered whether his layers of self-protection, all the scar tissue she did not fully understand, were so deep that he could never peel them away.
Still, his last e-mail suggested depths of feeling that he wanted to express, at least at a safe distance. Safe for her, as well—with painful honesty, she acknowledged that she was writing a man she might never see again. “So tell me about your career,” he had written. “The parts they left out of People Magazine.” For both their sakes, she would try to do that.
“Let me start with the obvious,” she typed. “I craved acting so deeply because it allowed me to escape. The roles I loved most were the furthest from my own reality. For a couple of hours I was in another place—there, not here—every part of me vibrating with this imaginary person who inhabited me completely. The Carla Pacelli people responded to was a vessel who allowed the real Carla to forget herself. Until the only self I knew was the woman hell-bent on gobbling up chances to become someone else.
“I got a scholarship to UCLA to study theater. No one in my class worked harder—as I think about it now, I was running for my life. Even my minor, psychology, was—or so I told myself—another way of understanding why imaginary people were the way they were. Another tool that allowed me to escape the fears of the child, the nights I woke up believing I still heard my mother’s cries as my father’s hand cracked against her face.”
Carla stopped here, remembering Ben’s description of his own father’s brutality to his mother. With surprising gentleness, he had told her, “At least when I turned sixteen, I was able to beat him to a pulp. All you could do is get away, any way you could. And now you feel bad about it. In Vietnam, we called that survivor’s guilt.”
This was true, Carla had realized. The nights she described to Adam had left a residue of shame—the beatings were still real, she knew, and all Carla had accomplished was to leave her mother behind. But she could not explain to Adam that Ben, whom he hated, had allowed her, at least partially, to forgive herself.
Instead, she wrote, “I’m sure this sounds melodramatic. It probably is. But the isolation of an only child, taught to hide her family’s shame, increased my sense of being alone. With other people, I was able to conceal that by becoming what I might’ve described as a ‘vivacious social drinker.’ An incipient drunk, in other words, who also dabbled in cocaine. But my driving need for theater kept me from going over the edge.
“When I graduated from college, I moved as far away from San Francisco as I could—to New York, a magnet for any would-be stage actor. I was a walking cliché: I lived in walk-ups with people I barely knew, did temp work or waited tables and, believe it or not, filled in as a singing waitress while a roommate with a better voice worked off-Broadway. So glad you weren’t there.” Carla smiled at this—in retrospect, she had been truly awful. “But my basic routine was get up at five a.m.; hang out in the Equity line at Times Square in whatever crummy weather, waiting to sign up for auditions; race off for a morning’s worth of secretarial work; come back for a one or two-minute audition; then pray for a call back while I ran off to hustle tips as a cocktail waitress.
“I had no agent, of course. Still, I landed a few roles in new plays way, way, off-Broadway. All that did was feed my hunger and desperation. ‘Why not me?’ the inner Carla kept crying out. No one seemed to hear me. And another voice kept telling me that I lacked that resonance that would leave casting directors as slack-jawed as I needed them to be.”
This account of her inner voice, Carla well knew, was less than fully honest. But recalling the real turning point still made her burn with shame.
Among her means of scraping together cash had been modeling. She refused to do lingerie ads, having heard from other young women stories of scarifying indignities. Instead, she showed up at a catalog company that also featured sportswear. The man in charge of selecting models—a slick, slender Italian with the face of a handsome ferret—told her to change into some swimsuits in a large, bare room with a black square she quickly realized was a one-way window. But the job paid a thousand dollars if the guy chose her, and her rent was due next week.
The man came out again—to her further shame, she no longer recalled his name—while a photographer took pictures. Then he praised her “energy of beauty,” and asked her out to lunch.
Carla had a callback for a bit part in two hours, and part of her knew better than to accept. But she smiled and said yes—after all, she might charm this guy into giving her the job. And lunch turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. The man was easy, yet authoritative, possessed of a certain practiced charm, asking questions about her life with seeming interest, smiling or laughing at her clever and utterly inauthentic answers. They drank two bottles of wine.
After lunch, he invited her back to his office—to sign a contract, she tried imagining. Instead, he offered her cocaine. Both high and dazed, Carla bent over his desk to snort a second line of powder. As she did, she felt the man reaching beneath her dress. Stunned, she realized that his finger was inside her, then his avid hands were pulling down her panties. In a tight voice, he said, “You want this, don’t you?”
In something like a fever dream, she remembered glimpsing her mother after a beating, tears staining her face as Carl Pacelli pushed her against the kitchen wall and entered her from behind. Neither parent knew what she had seen. But now, as a stranger pushed inside her, she realized he evoked her father, and heard herself whisper, “Yes.”
He came swiftly, then watched in silence as she arranged herself, unable to meet his eyes. “I’ve hired someone else,” he said. It was all she could do to raise her head and walk out the door, a pathetic pantomime of pride.
Afterward, filled with nausea and self-disgust, Carla had recoiled from the memory of her mother’s face as her tormentor took her from behind, a shattered yet stoic mask, and wondered whether she had sought her own humiliation at the hands of this Italian stranger. But the next day, and for a time after, she stopped using alcohol or drugs. Within a month, she had applied to the master in fine arts program at NYU.
To Adam, she wrote simply, “So I applied to graduate school.”
The rest was nothing for a letter. The story, if she ever told it, would require more love and trust than she had ever felt with anyone.
“To my surprise,” she continued, “I was awarded a full scholarship at NYU. It was like an answer to the prayers I no longer said. I could live and breathe theater, part of a golden group of men and women whose talent uplifted and inspired me. For the first time, I felt close to other people, a group whose ambitions I hoped would be realized with my own. I started liking myself better. And I became good—really good.”
Carla found herself typing faster, spurred by remembered energy. “NYU was a great school, with a buoyant and brilliant faculty that turned out serious actors. I did summer theater, got my best reviews anywhere, and won a good part in Equus. I found an agent—not a big name, but a hardworking woman who believed in me. She pushed me to stick out my three years of school—I was not only beautiful, she assured me, but I could have a real career, on stage as well as in film. ‘I only make money if you do,’ she told me. ‘The day our business takes me seriously is the day you become a major star. We’re each other’s get out of jail card.’ And pretty soon she’d found a first-rate casting director who started paying attention to me.
“The time I wasn’t in school or learning roles I spent with my friends. We catered parties to make money; did a little cocaine; sweated through exercise classes to stay in shape. Sometimes at pool parties in the Hamptons, coke-addled guests invited the caterers to jump in with them—the ones with the sleekest bodies—leaving the most light-fingered of us to scrounge leftovers for the rest. I went out with guys, but nothing serious—I was too busy, I told myself, and that was true enough. For the last two years of school I lived with a girlfriend in a fifth floor brick walk-up in the West Village, and the man both of us saw most was the masturbator in the next building. Par for the course, my roommate assured me—there was a pervert for every block in Manhattan.
“Day after day, I dedicated myself to acting. I never wanted to be a tabloid personality or a red-carpet actress. I wanted to stretch myself in the most challenging parts, to play them with nuance and humanity. I learned my plays cold, then experimented with the best way to deliver each line. I was always on time for work, and supportive of the other actors, knowing we could make each other better. My career was going to be about the craft, not the money. I knew very well about the harsh equation for actresses—career dwindling as they age, scratching for bit parts as the mother of some guy barely younger than they were. I was obsessed with becoming that rare, exceptional woman who was good enough to last.
“And then, at twenty-seven, it started to happen.”
Stretching to rest her back, Carla felt a sharp, sudden pain, the baby kicking her stomach. She touched the place where this happened, as if to answer him. It took a moment for her to recall the state of mind she described to Adam.
“It was just after graduation, and the part was in a small independent film. But I had the lead—a beautiful but destructive young woman who can’t give or receive love, and ends up sabotaging her own happiness.” Pensive, she felt her typing slow. “I was, perhaps, too good. I seemed to know the role from the inside out.
“When they opened the film at Sundance, I was praised for the ‘frightening authenticity’ of my portrayal. Truth to tell, I even scared myself at little. But I understood something else. As confident as I was on stage, my first and greatest love, my face registered in close-ups. What I felt wasn’t vanity, but a cool, knowing appraisal of the woman other people saw.”
Pausing, she considered this, a fateful pivot in her own life. “So I expected change,” she went on. “But not something so profoundly different and, beneath the surface, so potentially corrosive.
“A television executive was in the audience at Sundance. A month later, he asked my agent if I’d audition for the pilot of a proposed series for NBC. Your all-time favorite television program,” she added dryly, “the grittily authentic dramatic landmark, Deep Cover. A virtual documentary of the life of an undercover espionage agent, complete with constantly shifting identities, luxurious hotel suites in pseudo-European settings, and the ultimate weapon of any well-trained operative—cleavage. Acting, I was assured, was also desirable.
“It was so far from what I had in mind that I told Betsy—my agent—I didn’t see the point. But there was no harm in doing it, she argued—it was good exposure, and I probably wouldn’t get the part. She probably knew better all along. I was an actor, not a model—when I did the screen test, I absolutely nailed it. They wanted sex appeal: what they got, the producer told me, was an actress who popped through the screen. I was perfect for playing a tough girl, he told me, and that was certainly right. I was one. Or so I thought.
“Anyhow, I had to decide. The role would put me on the map, and Betsy with it. I could see how much she wanted this, though she spelled out the pros and cons as fairly as she could. To carry the show, they needed an actress with physical agility and sex appeal: the ‘almost feral complexity’ I brought to it (her words, not mine) would stamp the role as my own. They’d pay me a lot less than a bigger name—$10,000 a show to start, roughly a quarter million if the show was green-lit for an entire season—which still was way more money than I’d ever seen. If the series flopped, I wouldn’t lose much—I was more of a stage actress, after all. And if the show took off, I’d be a household name, sought for the female lead in plays or movies whenever I was on hiatus.
“Still, the downside of success was plain enough. A TV series would be a big diversion of energy from serious acting. Worse, they wanted a seven-year commitment, albeit with ever-escalating money. I’d have to move to LA, leaving my friends behind, for a 24/7 immersion in a part that didn’t speak to my soul and threatened to make me feel like a hamster on a wheel. And I’d be a celebrity, suddenly recognizable in ways I never wanted. For me, acting was about hiding out, the polar opposite of being famous. With an almost chilling premonition, I knew that signing on would be bad for me.
“But I was a blue-collar girl, really, and I felt guilty sneering at a chance other actresses would kill for. And for years, I’d just been scraping by. I told myself that the money would buy me the security later on, to do the parts I wanted to, not snatch at anything to pay the rent. And too many good actors, I knew too well, went broke and wound up selling real estate. So I took the role, hoping in the deepest part of me that the show would tank.”
Her fingers stopped. “Your mother,” she informed her stomach, “was delusional.” Then she continued typing.
“You know the rest, Adam—you once admitted to watching me on Monday nights. The show was the big new hit of the season, especially among our target audience, guys your age. So thanks a bunch.” She grimaced at the line, then added swiftly, “Truth to tell, mea culpa. I was too good an actress not to give it everything I had. The Emmy nomination that followed lulled me into thinking I’d done the right thing. Sure enough, offers started pouring in for me to do movies over the summer break.
“But in real life, I began playing the hamster. The schedule was a killer. Six days a week I’d get up at four, go to hair and makeup for an hour and a half—I was the girl, after all—and then act in virtually every scene. Fifteen or sixteen hours later, they drove me ‘home’ in a limousine to a rented place in Bel Air, filled with art and furniture someone else had chosen for me.
“During breaks I checked in with my ‘people.’ Suddenly I had a lot of them—Betsy; a business manager to look out for my money; the accountant he’d hired to help; a publicist; an assistant to keep my schedule and fend off calls; a personal trainer. Thanks to my manager, I suddenly had my own production company, with people to run it. Most of them were on commission; the rest on salary. It was like a parody of success from a Hollywood movie about Hollywood—later on, when I pieced it all together, I realized I was keeping about 25% of what I made. But I was too busy and too important to do the counting myself. Too busy, even to grasp how lonely I was.
“The only people I saw regularly were on the show—actors, writers, the directors and the crew—or the people I was paying to look after things. Guys were coming out of nowhere, wanting to date me, but I had no time. Every now and then I’d coke up to get myself through some late-night party.” She closed her eyes, feeling again the vertiginous rush of change. “I became this little industry—posing for the cover of magazines, endorsing a line of makeup. All, my manager assured me, to enhance my income and career.
“The reality crept over me by increments. Two seasons later, I was getting $150,000 an episode, about $3 million a year. But the series had defined me. Other actresses were getting roles I wanted but had no time to pursue. The plots grew more outlandish, the role numbingly the same—to amuse myself, I started doing accents I’d learned at NYU, a mockery of the serious work I’d trained to do. I was under more pressure to stay beautiful and slender; the cleavage grew ever deeper. Now and then I’d imagine adopting a child.”
Which omitted, Carla acknowledged to herself, the crucial subject of men. But she was not ready to broach this to Adam; it was too personal, and who knew if he really cared. And if he did, that would lead inevitably to the incendiary subject of Benjamin Blaine.
“Somehow, I’d imagined success would help me to discover the ‘real’ Carla Pacelli. But there was no real me. The one truly authentic thing about me—my passion for the craft—was crumbling.
“Even if you didn’t already know it, you could guess the rest—another cautionary tale from lotus land lacking even the virtue of originality. I was exhausted, mentally and, I suppose, spiritually. So I rationalized that alcohol would calm me down, and that a little coke in my trailer would keep me going. After a while, I threw in Valium to help me sleep.
“At first, the producers pretended not to notice; whatever kept me going was fine. But when I started getting shaky on the set, overacting or blowing my lines, they wrote in a secondary role for a very pretty and aggressive younger actress, playing my protégé and rival. If anything, the fact that she couldn’t act much deepened my insecurity and self-contempt. When I could stand myself no longer, I started going to more parties. I’d found a new role—Carla Pacelli, the television star, acting out a downward spiral. The woman you saw in that mug shot, headed for Betty Ford.”
She stopped to read her own words. “Again, I worry that so much of this is self-indulgent, a woman with too little to say answering questions you never asked. But your question about my career inevitably raises why it ended. And what I faced when the dreamscape turned real.
“The money vanished, too. My business manager, it transpired, had told me just enough to keep me from questioning where my income was going—to line his pockets, and that of the eminent Ponzi scheme operator who’d conned him. A tsunami of dishonesty and greed that stung a number of his show business clients.”
What seared her, Carla thought now, was her own carelessness—as though riches were her due, and would keep on coming endlessly. It took a real lack of character, she reckoned, for a girl who had no money to become a women who took it for granted. But that led Carla to the void within her.
“Coming to Martha’s Vineyard was another escape, it’s true. But what I really wanted was peace, more time to face hard truths with a certain merciless clarity. I’d been running all my life, and what I finally learned was that you take your demons, or your emptiness, everywhere you go.
“Dorothy Parker once wrote that ‘hell is other people.’ But I’d made my own hell, and the men and women I encountered at Betty Ford wound up enriching my life. As I get stronger, I’ll reach out to friends I valued in the past and lost track of. Perhaps I can even help my mother, as much as she cares to be helped. But no other person, not even this child, can fill the empty spaces, or change someone who doesn’t want to change.
“It seems simple, I know. But it took me thirty-three years to understand that there is no magic that can transform you. Only honesty and, I hope, a certain level of compassion. I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive my father. He’s responsible for all the damage he did, to my mother and to me. But I also know that none of us are Adam and Eve. Our parents start as children; the sins they practice aren’t original.”
Including Benjamin Blaine, she thought but did not write.
Motionless, she reflected for an indeterminate time—lost to her—before she went on. “This may seem presumptuous,” she concluded. “Perhaps it’s instinct; the sense of one being for another she doesn’t truly know. But, however obviously different we may be, I think some common themes may permeate our lives. And you’ve shown me more grace and understanding than I had any reason to expect. So I guess what I’m trying to do is open up things between us. For whatever that means, and for whatever good it does.
“Please know that I’m thinking of you.”
She stopped there, unwilling to erase the last paragraph, yet troubled by her own confusion. What she was raising was a possibility of a more intimate relationship, though it was hard to imagine how that could be—she was an alcoholic who had failed in her only career, pregnant with Ben’s child, and but for his troubling death and poisonous will they would not have met at all. A real prize, no doubt, especially for Adam Blaine. But she had written these last words, and could not bring herself to retract them.
Before, she had chosen men who could never meet her needs—whatever they were—and so could always imagine, and even desire, the end of a relationship. And acting, and all the issues surrounding her father, had kept romance at bay. Her first relationship in recovery had been with Benjamin Blaine. Though she valued his strength, and his support, she had known it could not last—first, there was his marriage, flawed though it was; later, there was the inevitable fact that the cancer in his brain would kill him. However sad, an end. Just as Afghanistan might be the end of Adam Blaine. Yet she prayed this would not be so, and knew that these prayers were not entirely selfless.
Perhaps she could not disentangle this impulse from Ben himself. As a father, Ben had damaged Adam, as he himself was damaged. Did she have some mystical, perhaps neurotic belief that she could reach back in time, salvaging Adam as no one could salvage Ben? Or did their mutual entwinement with Benjamin Blaine preordain another ending and, yet again, eliminate the emotional risk to a woman who might never learn to trust?
Hand resting on her stomach, she spoke to her son.
“I hate to tell you, sweetheart, but your brain-addled mom still has a ways to go. So I hope you can bear with me. But if it’s any incentive to get yourself born, even though we haven’t met yet, you may be the only man I’ve ever really loved.”
The telephone rang.
Strangely apprehensive, she answered it, “This is Dr. Stein,” he told her in a somber tone. “I’d like you to come in.”